From threat classification to enforceable protection: Regulatory gaps for threatened flora in Chile's biodiversity hotspot

Threat classifications are central to biodiversity policy, but their conservation effects depend on whether extinction-risk recognition is connected to enforceable obligations. This problem is acute in biodiversity hotspots, where threatened species often persist outside protected areas, on private lands and in productive rural landscapes subject to recurrent small-scale interventions. Using Chile as a policy-relevant case, this article examines how official threat classifications translate—or fail to translate—into enforceable protection for threatened vascular flora. Chile encompasses most of the Chilean Winter Rainfall–Valdivian Forests hotspot, where endemic flora persists in landscapes shaped by forest loss, agriculture, forestry plantations and infrastructure. The article reconstructs the regulatory pathways connecting threat classification with field-level protection. Three regulatory scenarios are distinguished. First, interventions affecting threatened species in native forest may trigger restrictions and permits. Second, projects entering the Environmental Impact Assessment System may generate binding obligations. Third, for species outside native forest regulation and environmental assessment, no uniform preventive trigger converts threat status into operational duties. This gap is illustrated through Corynabutilon salicifolium , a Critically Endangered endemic shrub persisting in productive rural microhabitats, including road-cut slopes, plantation margins and railway rights-of-way. The case shows how highly threatened plants may remain exposed to incremental losses of individuals, occupied habitat and local populations despite official recognition. The Chilean case suggests that tracing the pathway from threat classification to regulatory triggers, enforceable obligations and field-level mechanisms can provide a diagnostic lens for identifying conservation-governance gaps in different conservation systems.